Alone Among the Ghosts is an essay from The Nation by Marcela Valdez about Roberto Bolaño's
2666. She interviews journalist Sergio González Rodríguez, who has written extensively about the murders of women in Ciudad Juárez which is the black hole Bolaño's novel orbits around. The journalist was Bolaño's correspondent and main source of information about the femicides. The best English language article about the epidemic of violence in Ciudad Juárez I have read is Max Blumenthal's
2002 Salon article. The website
No Angel Came is a good resource for more info on the subject, including a continually updated section with
links to articles about the killings. The site's most arresting section is the
list of every woman killed in Ciudad Juárez from 1993 to 2006. The epidemic of violence against women in Ciudad Juárez continues.
posted by Kattullus
on Apr 21, 2009 -
26 comments
"At a convocation of writers in Seville, Spain, six weeks before Bolaño died [in 2003], he was declared to be the most influential Latin-American writer of his generation." (
NYer)
And since then, Roberto Bolaño's reputation has been growing (NYRB:
"The Great Bolano").
A man who dismissed magical realism as "shit" is more the heir of Cortazar and Borges (his two idols) than Garcia Marquez or Vargas Lllosa yet he is also something entirely new. Bolano was also the founder of infrarealism, a movement whose manifesto proclaims "A new lyricism springing up in Latin America, nourishing itself in ways that continue to amaze us.... Tenderness like an exercise in speed. Breath and heat. Experience at full tilt, self-consuming structures, stark raving contradictions."
Why has the
English speaking world not heard of Bolaño? His great novel,
The Savage Detectives, a sprawling work about youth and poetry and chaos (with no less than 52 narrators across several continents) has
only this year been translated.
posted by vacapinta
on Aug 27, 2007 -
24 comments
